Me, My Hair, and I by editor Elizabeth Benedict Read Free Book Online

life as I have, duking it out with them every single humidiphobic day.
    This was not always the case. I was born with “naturally curly hair.” It did everything my mother wanted it to. People stopped her on the street. “Naturally curly!” they’d gasp. “She’s
blesse
d
!” Pity my poor straight-haired sister. Jo Ann was pressed into biannual perms. Every six months she’d pass a chemical-scented afternoon at Best and Company, wired to black rods dangling from a chrome dome that shot electricity through her hair. She’d come home with a ridged coif that blasted out at the sides like Clarabell’s. It took two weeks to calm down. After a month, it verged on normal, almost as if she too were blessed with naturally curly hair.
    Something happened. One day in summer camp, bored during rest hour, I took the manicuring scissors out of my sewing kit and, without a mirror, gave myself a haircut. It was work. Manicuring scissors can’t handle much more than a cuticle. But I had an hour and I kept at it, watching wispy letter
C
s waft down on my Camp Red Wing blanket.
    â€œ WHAT HAVE YOU DONE ?” Mom shrieked on visiting day.
    She marks the change in my hair to that self-inflicted haircut. It was no longer naturally curly. It grew back pure frizz. This dovetailed with the onset of puberty. Much as it alters your hips and breasts, puberty can reconfigure your follicles too. So can chemotherapy. Friends who have endured it invariably like their new hair better. Straights became curly. Curlies became straight. That said, I don’t recommend chemotherapy as a hair treatment, although it’s the only one I haven’t tried.
    From the ages of twelve through twenty-one, I slept in rollers with Scotch tape across my bangs. I left for college with my very own salon hood dryer. I spent my honeymoon in Barbados without getting my hair wet once. I’ve had my hair wound tight around my head like a turban at the late Louis-Guy D’ on East Fifty-Seventh Street. Kenneth yanked it taut on rollers the width of a French bread. Philip torched it at Crimpers, once searing my temple so badly it left a scar the size of a calcium pill. Ralph at Bumble and Bumble stretched and fried it. I endured potash and lye and human Mexican placenta in a roach-ridden emporium above a strip joint on Broadway. Irons and flat wands. Cornrows with beads, cornrows without. Diet control. Dryers that parched my eyeballs. Sleeping with a stocking stretched over my head. Do-rags. Dippity-do and Dixie Peach. Beer and Miss Jessie’s. Gels and sprays. Alberto VO5 and Toni home perms in reverse. I draw the line at the Japanese treatment. Formaldehyde is not for the living. Once, channeling the very beautiful Bernadette Peters, I visited a salon that specializes in curls. There are two in New York: Ouidad and Devachan. Both use a similar technique: drenching a wet head with their product, followed by scrunching (never combing or brushing), then letting the hair air-dry, which takes forever. You’re not just waiting for water to evaporate. You’ve got four ounces of goop in there too. In theory, this results in the much-coveted “curl differentiation.” The curls separate. You have countless Shirley Temple springs. It’s a look. It just isn’t mine. And you have to do it every day or it gets mashed.
    Three years ago, I tried the keratin treatment. How strange it is to get exactly what you want, exactly what you hoped for. Keratin works. My hair was straight in a way it had never been. Stick straight and shiny. It was life-changing. I immediately stopped having good days and bad days based on my hair. For as long as the keratin lasted (three months), I woke up flawless. I pulled my hair back in a scrunchy and it stayed there. I swam! I played tennis! I washed my hair and was good to go! A whole new world opened up, a world without hair anxiety. Men gazed at me with longing on the street.